Parliament

Parliament is presented as a political institution whose promise of influence steadily contracts under Henry VIII. For Margaret Pole, it first offers her son Geoffrey a route into public life and a means of shaping opinion; later, it becomes the venue for an oath defining the succession and an attainder that strips the Plantagenets of their standing and possessions. Across these episodes, parliamentary participation remains consequential, but the king increasingly determines the terms on which law and political reality are declared.

A possible route to influence

Margaret sees a parliamentary career as a practical way for Geoffrey Pole to gain a position at court. She gives him the seat of Wilton, which is in her gift, because she values his judgment in managing his lands and his relations with tenants and neighbors. After dinner, she advises him to use Parliament as a stepping-stone: his speeches can present him as thoughtful and loyal, attract attention, and help him build relationships that may give his proposals influence with the king.

Geoffrey questions the model she offers. He recalls that Thomas More had spoken in support of Parliament’s power, while Margaret stresses a different part of More’s example: as speaker, he had persuaded members to do the king’s will. Her advice is not that Geoffrey should challenge royal authority, but that he should make himself useful within its reach. She contrasts his prospects with those of her elder sons, Arthur Pole and Henry Pole, Lord Montague, who had gained royal favor through companionship and entertainment in a more carefree court. In her view, those earlier opportunities have passed; advancing now requires a political strategy.

Geoffrey’s parliamentary service brings visible recognition. When the court leaves London, he is knighted for his service to the king in Parliament. Margaret takes pride in the honor, imagining that her late husband would share it. The moment confirms Parliament’s value as a place where service can be noticed and rewarded, even as the court remains the source of that recognition.

Law, counsel, and royal authority

The limits of parliamentary and legal influence emerge in Margaret’s appeal to Thomas More on behalf of her son Montague. She asks More to speak for him, then argues that the king must not be encouraged to treat the law as his own instrument: kings, she maintains, should live under the law like other people. More agrees with the principle but describes Henry VIII as learning that he can make the law. His reply makes the constitutional tension personal: the king’s authority is growing beyond the reach of the counsel that might have guided him as a prince.

The conflict widens when the king takes control of the Church. Montague tells Princess Mary Tudor that the Church has surrendered to Henry VIII, who will rule it himself and disregard the Pope in England. Thomas More has returned the seal of the Lord Chancellor and resigned. Mary understands the change as a transfer of the Church’s wealth, laws, and courts into the king’s possession. Parliament’s later role in the succession oath belongs to this changed political landscape: disputes once subject to competing religious and royal authorities are increasingly resolved through the king’s claims and the institutions he commands.

The succession oath

In the spring of 1534, Margaret is summoned with the other peers to the Privy Council at the Palace of Westminster. Thomas Cromwell, now Lord Chancellor, is to administer the oath of succession to the nobility. The scene makes Parliament’s members appear less like authors of a settlement than participants being instructed in what they must affirm.

The oath concerns a succession dispute bound up with the validity of Henry VIII’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon. The Pope has publicly ruled that the marriage is valid and that Henry should live with his wife, but he has not excommunicated the king. Margaret therefore sees no simple authorization for defiance: each person must decide what to do. At the same time, the king claims that the Pope has no authority in England and that his own declarations determine who is queen and who is a princess. The conflict is not merely over the wording of an oath. It is over who can establish the truth on which inheritance and royal status depend.

Thomas More refuses to take the oath as it stands, although he is willing to sign a revised version that he finds acceptable. He does not condemn those who drafted or signed it; his refusal is presented as a matter of conscience. Henry VIII had promised More that he would not be tested on this issue, but breaks that promise. Parliament’s role in administering the oath thus coincides with a personal test imposed on a former royal friend, showing how an institutional demand reaches into individual conscience.

Attainder and silence

By the summer of 1539, Parliament is used against the Plantagenet family through an Act of Attainder. The measure declares its members traitors without trial or evidence, forfeits their goods to the Crown, and disinherits their children. Margaret and Gertrude Courtenay are listed among the dead, a detail that makes the proceeding appear to erase people as well as their legal rights.

Thomas Cromwell presents letters attributed to Gertrude and a letter Margaret had written to her son Reginald Pole to assure him of her love. He also produces a white silk badge embroidered with the five wounds of Christ and a white rose, given to Margaret by Thomas Darcy. Cromwell offers the badge as conclusive evidence, although possessing it is not itself a crime. The Houses of Commons and Lords respond barely at all. Their silence does not undo the attainder: Margaret is kept in the Tower at the king’s wish, along with her grandson Harry Pole, Gertrude, and Gertrude’s young son.

The contrast between Geoffrey’s earlier advancement and Margaret’s later condemnation defines Parliament’s changing place in the narrative. It can offer a young man a platform and a path to royal favor, but it can also give formal shape to a punishment whose evidentiary basis is weak and whose reach extends to children and property. The institution’s procedures remain visible; its capacity to restrain the Crown does not.